Altcoins

Ethereum Classic About To Make Its Move?

Is Ethereum Classic about to shoot for the moon?

Nothing is ever certain in the world of crypto-investment, but sometimes there are key indicators that can help keep traders and HODLers informed. I’m not just talking about TA here either – Ethereum Classic (ETC) has seen a lot of recent developments that could combine into the perfect storm that could help bring the currency to the next level.

Let’s start with the first general factor and move onto the more current affairs in the ETC space that are worth paying attention to.

Similarities to Bitcoin

One of the lesser-known aspects of Ethereum Classic is that ita origin story draws a lot of parallels with that of Bitcoin, arguably making it one of the closest things to Bitcoin there is.

Ethereum Classic didn’t have an ICO and doesn’t engage in transaction rollbacks – that’s pretty much the foundation of the formation of the project. The DAO hack led to a rift in the Ethereum community that resulted in a hard fork in which many of the original developers continued with the Ethereum project, agreeing to a rollback to return the lost funds.

Ethereum Classic supporters felt that this was the antithesis of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology and that the blockchain should be immutable, mirroring the core beliefs of the Bitcoin community. Ethereum Classic also runs off the Proof of Work model with no plans to change to PoS like Ethereum. While the cost to the environment is higher, PoS comes with centralization issues that the Ethereum Classic community are unwilling to risk.

Added to Coinbase

Coinbase recently announced the listing of Ethereum Classic, something which could prove major for upwards price movement.

Final testing for ETC support is now wrapping up and Coinbase Pro will be open for inbound ETC transfers on August 07 of this year.

Along with the listing comes a bunch of other features, such as Coinbase custody – the team is adding support for inbound transfers and withdrawals, an insurance protocol that will enable institutional traders to deal in ETC as well as more casual investors.

The market team is adding market support and allowing 24–48 hours of transfers through Pro/Prime before opening the markets once liquidity is high enough.

ETC transactions soared to almost 50,000 in one day in preparation for the listing as users accumulate in the hopes that the price will moon.

Roadmap and Team

The ETC team are taking a more conservative approach compared to the Ethereum project, where progress moves at a breakneck pace – and then breaks things. While Ethereum has often been accused of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, ETC has a ‘slow and steady wins the race’ methodology – and they’ve been sticking to it.

Most recently the team removed the ‘difficulty bomb’ placed by the original developers. Aimed to discourage the miners from the Proof of Work system and force the PoS switchover, the bomb was essentially a failsafe that would eliminate the miner rewards and as such remove any incentive for miners to validate transactions, something that would have totally killed the project.

The team was able to defuse the difficulty bomb on time and keep things moving. Next up is sharding for chain scaling, a light app for IoT and mobile, followed by mesh networks in 2020.

ETC is headed up by Igor Artamonov who is the CTO and a Founder – Artamonov is a professional software developer since 2001, have been writing code since 1995. Scalable, decentralized, distributed and fault-tolerant applications, storing and processing big data, security and encryption. 

Big Backers

I’m talking here, of course, about Barry Silbert, a major investor tirelessly evangelizing ETC. But it’s not Silbert alone – he owns and founded Grayscale Investments which made a major investment in ETC and even set up an Ethereum Classic Investment Trust.
“ETC Trust enables investors to gain exposure to the price movement of ETC through a traditional investment vehicle, without the challenges of buying, storing, and safekeeping ETC.”
Silbert personally invested at $0.50 two years ago, seeing his investment rise over 90 times in value. He also founded Digital Currency Group, a company that funds promising entrepreneurs as an “angel investor” and invests in cryptocurrency. Silbert claims the company almost never trades, and favors holding tokens long-term instead. At the end of last year, DCG held over $600 million worth of cryptocurrency, and 90% of that was in Bitcoin, Zcash, and Ethereum Classic.
DCG funded CoinDesk, BitPay, and Ripple, and went on to buy CoinDesk in 2016 – a major player to have backing ETC.

The ETC cooperative report details over $1 million in donations along with almost doubling the social media following on Twitter and Reddit and doubling the amount of daily transactions to nearly 50,000. The goal of the cooperative is to support the ETC “community, development, and marketing efforts within the Ethereum Classic ecosystem” with the intention of making it better by “removing pain points and obstacles that interfere with ETC’s current and future users”.

Asian Support

Finally, ETC has been steadily gaining support throughout Asian markets. A major conference called the Ethereum Classic Summit is due to be held in Korea on 12-13 September 2018 with speakers like Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson along with Grayscale, Coinbase, and ETC reps, and Fundstrat’s Thomas Lee. Lee describes Ethereum Classic as a “hybrid coin” between Ethereum and Bitcoin and recommends it as an investment to his clients.
As newsbtc.com pointed out in a piece entitled “Asian Cryptocurrency Trading Update: Ethereum Classic The Only Winner,” in June, ETC was the only coin to continue performing well in the Asian markets during the market decline, pumping 25% despite the bearish trends. CryptoCompare also shows data on how ETC is being purchased more strongly in Asian exchanges, meaning it may be performing well despite the fact that it has yet to truly break into the western market – such a breakthrough may be on the way.

Recent bullish news coupled with the support seen in the Asian markets means the future could be looking up for Ethereum Classic, making it our pick for cryptocurrencies to keep an eye on over the coming weeks and months.

Or days – following the recent Coinbase announcement, ETC is up 14% at the time of writing.

Remember folks, Crypto is comin!

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Interested in other cool crypto posts….check out Uncorrelated assets, the “holy grail” of portfolio allocation.and The Price of Bitcoin vs Cost of Mining.

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Who is Barry Silbert?

What do Coindesk, Digital Currency Group, and Second Market all have in common?

They’re all owned by Barry Silbert, the early investor worth about half a billion dollars who’s been cheering on Bitcoin and crypto for years.

Silbert heard about Bitcoin in 2011 and describes his perspective as evolving through arrange of emotions that all true crypto fans are probably familiar with.

  • Dismissive
  • Skeptical
  • Intellectually Curious
  • Believer/Investor
  • Evangelism!

He started buying Bitcoin in 2012 at $8 and began angel investing in different companies the same year. An influential and occasionally controversial figure in the space, Silbert is noted not only for his staggering success, but for his enthusiastic cheerleading of different coins that he or his company hold. This has lead some social media users to nickname him “Barry Shilbert”. That’s social media for you.

Perhaps both reputations are well-deserved. He invested in Ethereum Classic less than two years ago at $0.50 per token and saw it increase over 90 times in value, seeing more growth than Bitcoin did in the same amount of time. He continues to back the currency and offer tips on Twitter while posting bullish statements as well.

His social media activity have caused concern that US regulators may take an interest. Securities lawyers have pointed out that while there’s nothing to be done about individuals attempting to influence token value in the unregulated crypto space, one of Silbert’s companies deals in US government-regulated securities whose value is derived from crypto, raising the issue of whether Silbert’s actions constitute illegal price manipulation prohibited by US law.

Silbert didn’t let the concerns go unanswered. He insisted that he was “highly sensitive” to the regulations regarding price manipulation and stated that he and his companies were fully subject to “anti-fraud provisions and insider trading”. To date he has made no comment about his online nickname… I don’t think anyone will hold that one against him!

Regardless of the gray area he may be straying into legally, it’s always worthwhile hearing what crypto giants are thinking and how they got to where they are. Barry Silbert made an appearance at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit and made a number of interesting points that we’re going to get into today. First, let’s take a closer look at his companies.

Digital Currency Group

Digital Currency Group is a company that funds promising entrepreneurs as an “angel investor” and invests in cryptocurrency. Silbert claims the company almost never trades, and favors holding tokens long-term instead. At the end of last year, DCG held over $600 million worth of cryptocurrency, and 90% of that was in Bitcoin, Zcash, and Ethereum Classic.

DCG played a key role in the funding and development of projects like CoinDesk, BitPay, and Ripple. They even went on to buy CoinDesk outright in 2016. Another subsidiary company of DCG is Grayscale, an investment firm that manages Bitcoin Investment Trust, the first ever company to offer shares and securities whose value is derived solely from cryptocurrency. It’s a big step for adoption, but investment opportunities are available only to accredited investors with hundreds of thousands of dollars at their disposal.

Silbert’s Summit Predictions: Good news, Bad news


Bad news first. Silbert firmly believes that the vast majority of cryptocurrencies are going to crash all the way down to zero.

That’s right – not “drop to a lower market value”, not “suffer a permanent correction over time” – zero. Nothing. Worthless. Similar sentiments were expressed by Goldman Sachs’ Steve Strongin. “Because of the lack of intrinsic value (in some correlated currencies), the currencies that don’t survive will most likely trade to zero… Most, if not all, will not see their recent peaks again.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom – far from it. In fact, when you hear the reasoning behind Silbert’s prediction, it’s rather good news. It actually makes a lot of sense. Silbert is convinced that there will only be one major player in each available “role” in the crypto space. He thinks there will only be one digital gold, only one privacy coin, one fast transaction coin, etc. Unlike in other markets, he thinks that the results of crypto will be somewhat binary – succeed or fail completely.

Wall Street Infrastructure

Silbert also alluded to what many have come to suspect recently amid the recent onslaught of FUD, fake news, and price drops, which is that Wall Street is starting to get in on the action.

“Behind the scenes, infrastructure is being built – on ramp, off ramp – to enable Wall Street to access this asset class in ways that you cannot imagine,” Silbert said, predicting that a “tidal wave of capital” from asset managers around the world will make its way into crypto markets in the next 12 to 24 months.

Interesting tidings indeed. This would herald the beginning of real widespread mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency, flooding the market with big money and increasing the market cap significantly. With deep-pocketed investors and hedge funds comes reduced volatility as large amounts are held for stable and consistent time periods. If the predictions are true, crypto might soon exit the Wild West territory we see it in today. The coming years might see crypto enter the big leagues of international adoption and investment.

While people like Strongin and Silbert should always be listened to with a measure of skepticism due to their vested interest in the space, early crypto investors tend to be people to keep an eye on – all it takes is one investment like the many successful calls that Silbert has made to change a life forever.

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CRYPTO TWITTER: Who you need to follow

CRYPTO TWITTER: Who you need to follow

Twitter is a must for anyone looking to keep up with the cryptocurrency industry. There is so much news coming out every single day that it can be tough to keep up with. To help out, I created a list of the top twitter accounts to follow with everything from trading, news, venture capital, content creators and relevant influencers in Crypto Twitter. This list will be updated from time to time. 

For other resources check out the rest of our guides in the top menu. A guide to crypto exchanges, online crypto resources, beginners guide to wallets, beginners guide to masternodes, and a two part introduction to cryptocurrencies.

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